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Altered States: Vampirella One-Shot Review

Do fanboys and fangirls need to explore the science fiction side of this literary warrioress? Read on to find out.

The official description from Dynamite:

Welcome to Altered States… Dynamite Entertainment’s parallel reality in the vein of DC’s Elseworlds and Marvel’s What If! Ella Normandy is one of three space explorers sent on an expedition to Venus-But on the way to their destination, the interplanetary ship is sucked into a mysterious space-time portal and ends up crash-landing on the alien planet Drakulon, where the rivers run with blood. There she climbs from the wreckage to find herself the only human on a planet filled with vampires-and no way to get back home!

This comic presents a series of what-if moments that highlight the core of a specific property. And through the works of a sturdy creative team, our protagonist finds her iconic role in a different universe without missing a beat. It’s a fun, albeit, slightly irrelevant take on Vampirella but there happens to be plenty of complimentary aspects within these pages.

Nancy A. Collins pens the script and this one-shot staring Ella from Urth is greatly complemented by the scribe’s literary skills. The plot follows a straight forward execution that pushes all of us into the landscape of Drakulon. The results are engaging but the whole of the yarn, because of it’s brief nature, evolves a bit too quickly as the written word yields little time for our heroine to breathe before she jumps into her new role. Even so, as it is, this edition of Altered States kept my attention to the point that I hope that there might be a continuation down the road someday.

This paricular release is complemented by a series of pencil strokes that execute the meat of the narrative quite well. Francesco Manna offers line-work that kept to the core of the franchise through the means of some rather simplistic science fiction visuals, and the results, for the most part, were good. However there were a few moments where a lack of background detail made the display feel underdeveloped, even as the colors by Viviane Souza smartly attempted to fill those occasional gaps.

Altered States: Vampirella wastes little time offering up an adventure that’s competent, compelling and weird enough to be worthy of a title that attempts to re-invent what we know. It’s not perfect but there’s enough here to warrant a recommendation.